Radovan Karadzic tells UN court the Bosnian war was 'just and holy'

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, told a UN court that the
Serbs' cause in the Bosnian war was "just and holy".

He suspended the boycott of his genocide trial to outline his defence to a UN court.

"I will defend that nation of ours and their cause that is just and holy," Karadzic told the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) which is presided over by judge O-Gon Kwon.

"We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof."

Karadzic stands charged as the "supreme commander" of an ethnic cleansing campaign of Croats and Muslims in the 1992-95 Bosnian war in which 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million displaced. He has pleaded not guilty.

He is expected to portray the Serbs as a minority that acted in self-defence in the Bosnian war in his first appearance at the trial which opened in October last year.

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The wartime leader, who is conducting his own defence in The Hague, will argue over the next two days that the 1992-95 conflict "was a civil war that the Serbs did not want," his legal adviser Marko Sladojevic said last week.

Karadzic, 64, will tell the judges of the ICTY that Bosnian Serbs "merely responded to the actions of others," said the lawyer.

He was arrested on a Belgrade bus in July 2008 after 13 years on the run and faces life imprisonment.

Prosecutor Alan Tieger told the tribunal last year that Karadzic was the "supreme commander" of an ethnic cleansing campaign of Croats and Muslims in pursuit of a Greater Serbia that was to include 60 percent of the territory of Bosnia.

This included the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,000 captured Muslim men and boys, and the 44-month siege of the capital Sarajevo that ended in November 1995 with some 10,000 people killed.

Karadzic is alleged to have worked with Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who died in March 2006 four years into his own genocide trial in which he also conducted his own defence.

Karadzic boycotted the start of his trial in October last year, insisting on more time to prepare and causing a four-month delay.

The court appointed Richard Harvey, a British lawyer, in November to take over the defence in case Karadzic continued his absence.

Karadzic has already tried to delay the trial until June 17 to study an additional 400,000 pages of prosecution evidence he claims have been filed since October.

His request was refused by the court which ruled last Friday that the first prosecution witness, whose identity is being withheld, will testify on Wednesday.

His legal adviser said that Karadzic was likely to resume his boycott on Wednesday.